Jenna knew there was something more to the LuvBot Factory than the bubblegum brightness of the "official tour". The pink guide bot with hearts for pupils gave her the creeps, and as a reporter, she could smell bullshit from a mile away... After sneaking away from the bizarre trip through the facade, she used her athletic build and a multitool to pop open a grate and slip into the ventilation system. Here, taking the claustrophobic path deep into the heart of the facility, she would get the answers to her questions.
She dropped out into a darkened hallway; an ominous twin to the one she'd just fled. This one had no lighting, save some weak glowing from fire safety lights on the floor. The vents had been oppressively hot. Sweat poured down her face, soaking her white babydoll top. She brushed the clamminess from her hands onto her pantlegs before stalking forward, careful of the sounds she made.
Jenna had no idea what she was looking for. Regardless, there had to be a reason that BotCo had always been so secretive about the production at this factory. Her employer would pay some serious bluebacks if she broke a major story on one of the New Economy's rising stars. She keyed the camera in her dark-rimmed glasses. Besides recording her expedition into the inner workings of BotCo's most secretive of facilities, it overlaid a recording of her surroundings that had been enhanced for brightness onto the lenses themselves, allowing her a roundabout form of night vision that let her stalk through the deserted hallways without the use of a flashlight.
That was the first hint that there was something wrong. All these corridors should have been piled with people. Technicians, programmers, maintenance staff, anyone and everyone required to produce the number of machines that the factory churned out every day. That was the law, after all, set down in the Automation Regulations of 2101. There should be humans around...but it was a ghost town. Jenna took careful steps, peeking around every corner to spot any obvious surveillance equipment. The last thing she wanted was for some corpo cop to spot her before finding the story of a lifetime!
She took a right turn, running abruptly into a gridwork of infrared lasers. She spotted them, but before she could stop, the very tip of her left shoe brushed against the sensor.
"INTRUDER DETECTED," the voice over the loudspeaker declared a moment later. "INITIATING STANDARD THREAT MITIGATION PROTOCOL."
Jenna didn't like the sound of that! She took off at a run, heading back the way she came. Mechanical clunks chased after her, each heralding the activation of a cluster of lights. After the sixth, the illumination caught up to her and she was lit up as plain as day. She increased her pace, suddenly wishing for a comfortable job as a desk jockey back at headquarters, rather than an intrepid field reporter. Jumping back into the vent wouldn't be viable. She called up the blueprints in her glasses, directing her to an emergency exit not two minutes away at a dead run. The reporter could be free in moments.
A sudden stinging pain on her left leg nearly threw off her balance and sent her tumbling. Instead, she quickly recovered her disrupted rhythm and rounded a corner, looking both ways before inspecting what had hit her calf. She caught the glowing muzzle of what looked like a gun mounted on the ceiling like a surveillance camera. Some kind of deterrence projectile, like a rubber bullet? It didn't matter. She had to get out of there right away before they started to send more than just non-lethal projectiles after her!
Her pace slowed. The injury on her leg wasn't fading. It still hurt with a dull throb that reminded her of a toothache. After she returned to the first of the corridors, she hid in an alcove and chanced an examination of the wound.
She stifled a scream. A strange geometric spiderweb pattern spread out from the impact point. It had a glossy silver colour along most of its surface, but specks of it pulsed with neon green light.
In a panic, she tried shucking off her pants. But even with her torn jeans removed, the metal web remained, seemingly fused to the surface of her skin.
The sound of heavy footsteps told her it was time to move. Without an idea as to how to how to proceed, she decided to hide while she figured out her next step. Several doors down the hall lead her to a small janitorial closet. Prying it open, she tossed the jeans into a corner and waited. The footfalls stomped by, one of the muttering in one of those corpo lingos with a lotta jargon and 'Code Reds'. Jenna waited for the echos of their passage to fade before assessing her wound.
To her horror, it had grown. The webbing now encompassed her entire thigh. The gooey presence was spreading both up and down her body from the impact point, nearly reaching her ankle while also heading straight for her groin. Her skin was changing to a similar hue as the web, turning from a light peach to a grey streaked with that same geometric web.
Jenna tried pulling the webbing off, but it stung like she was trying to rip out her own hair. The skin under it felt cold to the touch as well. Almost if it really was metal. She relented. What they hell was this thing?!
Her smart glasses, though not top of the line by any means, had limited diagnostic capabilities. According to the First Aid medical application she'd loaded, her leg was showing all the signs of...GreyU!
GreyU, or Grey Goo For U as it was originally marketed, were a propitiatory design of nanobots owned and operated by BotCo. It was said that the concentrated swarms of beyond microscopic machines could be harnessed to cause any number of transformative effects on matter. And at the moment, those crazy crawling critters were turning her into some kind of robot!
But those had been banned! She had her story all right: "Crooked Corp Shills Sanctioned Scourge in Sentry Syringe Shooters!" But it'd do her no good with her body slowly turning into that of a machine! As they moved up, her clothes melted into nothingness upon contact. Jenna watched in mute horror as her socks and panties disappeared at the same time. Soon she would be naked, as if she didn't have enough problems!
